Monday 23 April 2012

Misty watercolour memories...



It seems the great "analogue switch-off" and the new, bright digital television future has sparked a bit of a wave of nostalgia in the UK. Not only has the demise of Ceefax generated a flurry of tributes on more modern media (such as Twitter), but The Guardian today has a huge debate going on in its comments columns in response to an article about the famous test card of the girl and the scary clown.



Among the topics unearthed by the myriad commenters - the majority of whom appear to be of my generation - is whether anyone else remembers the colour test films of the late 60s and early 70s. Of course I do!

As a kid we didn't have much, but we did have one of the earliest colour televisions - courtesy of Radio Rentals (renting stuff was very popular back then as I recall; even our washing machine was rented from Servis).

I remember vividly the very early colour programming. My love of Bollywood today stems from the occasional luridly bright clip that they would feature on Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan, the 60s/70s TV programme for recently arrived Asians. I would get up especially early to watch those twirling, glittering ladies on a Sunday morning. No wonder my mother never expected grandchildren...

The other great fascination - and in complete contrast to everything else on telly (which was all black and white up until Wimbledon 1967, and remained mostly black and white for many years after) - were the "trade test colour films". All fairly short, some merely instructional (how cars are made, the history of plastic, and other dull subjects for a kiddie-winkie), some just weirdly psychedelic, they were entrancing and magical to me!

Like a window on the world, these technicolour marvels seemed to be mainly either silent or foreign. Nothing really happened in any of them. Nothing needed to happen, really, for me as a very small child. Seeing people in colour was enough.

But here we are (scarily) six decades on, dear reader, and I have re-discovered a particular favourite from that era! Of course I never remembered its name at the time but on watching it again, the dim and distant memories started seeping back...

From the YouTube blurb:
Giuseppina is a 1960 short documentary film produced by James Hill. It won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. Production of the film was sponsored by the British Petroleum company (BP), which also distributes the film. The BP webpage summarizes the film as, "set at an Italian petrol station where various characters pass through on their onward journey, while entertaining and playing with the attendant's daughter, Giuseppina."

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Giuseppina was broadcast 185 times on British television.
And here it is in full:




A comprehensive list of trade test films of that era

For all your television anorak needs, visit Transdiffusion

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